While a processor may access resources, such as a text file, on a hard drive, this accessing process may take time and reduce the performance efficiency for an application. The processor may access a compressed resource file more quickly than an uncompressed resource file, when stored on a hard drive. However, any gains in the efficient reading of a compressed resource file may be eliminated in the decompression of that compressed resource file.
The language characters in a text file may be represented by any number of binary encoding systems. A software application may use the Unicode industry standard to represent and manipulate text in multiple written languages. A character in a text string may be represented in Unicode by two bytes. Independent of the Unicode standard, a single byte may usually be used to represent all the characters in two written languages. Most existing single byte encoding standards may be unreliable and relatively slow in decoding, as these single byte encoding standards were designed for a particular language and not multiple languages. Eight-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8) and other mixed single/multi byte encodings may reduce the size of just a small group of languages.
One type of single language encoding standard that a software application may use is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). ASCII may be used to encode text containing English language characters.